Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

accepted it immediately for publication. The only drawback was that Violette Leduc became completely infatuated with Beauvoir, who found that she had to lay down very strict rules if their friendship was to continue.
    Violette Leduc struck up a close
entente
with Jean Genet, and these two outsiders provided a great deal of voyeuristic interest to Sartre and his friends. The one person with whom Leduc clashed temperamentally was Nathalie Sarraute, the novelist who had hidden Samuel Beckett during the Occupation. Leduc tried to get on with Sarraute, but their almost chemical incompatibility was made worse by jealousy: Sarraute was indubitably Sartre’s protégée, while Leduc’s position with Castor was far less secure.
    The autumn of 1945 saw the great existentialist boom, although Sartre and Beauvoir were irritated that the label was automatically attached to anything they wrote. In September Beauvoir’s novel of the Resistance,
The Blood of Others,
enjoyed both critical and commercial success. Over the course of the next couple of months came two volumes of Sartre’s
Roads to Freedom
and the first number of
Les Temps modernes
. Sartre’s lecture, ‘
L’Existentialisme est-il un humanisme
?’, on 29 October 1945, was packed out; hundreds could not get into the hall, and women fainted in the crush.
    Les Temps modernes
wielded a tremendous influence. The title was partly inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s film
Modern Times,
but the name was principally intended to stand for an era of intellectual change. Its editorial committee alone was enough to guarantee attention, for it included Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus, Merleau-Ponty as philosophy editor, and Michel Leiris and Raymond Queneau for poetry and literature, as well as Raymond Aron and Jean Paulhan, the grammarian, whowas the only one with any experience of running a literary review. Malraux was invited to join but refused, partly, one suspects, because he was abandoning the radicalismof his youth. Considering Beauvoir’s dislike of him – ‘he takes himself for Goethe and Dostoyevsky at the same time’ – it was just as well that he stayed out.
    Gaston Gallimard agreed to back the publication and to give it office space; three of its editors – Paulhan, Camus and Queneau – were on Gallimard’s own editorial committee, to say nothing of the others who were his authors. The first problem was to secure a paper ration. Beauvoir and Leiris went to see Jacques Soustelle, de Gaulle’s Minister of Information, but he was reluctant because Raymond Aron, who had turned against the General, was on their committee. In fact, Aron was to leave not long afterwards because of an ideological dispute.
    Simone de Beauvoir saw
Les Temps modernes
as the showpiece of what she called the ‘Sartrian ideal’. Almost immediately, however, she found herself swamped by manuscripts and besieged by earnestly ambitious young writers. It seemed as if half the young men on the Left Bank had been working on equally gloomy, pseudo-existentialist novels of the Resistance, because that was what was expected of them.
    The theatre in France during the last two years of the Occupation had certainly proved itself alive, even if many leading members of the profession found themselves under clouds of varying sizes at the Liberation.
    Parisian audiences had been educated to the avant-garde in the 1920s, and in the years before the war the playwrights Anouilh, Giraudoux, Salacrou and Cocteau had already prepared the ground for what is seen as the post-Liberation theatre.
    Sartre’s first play,
The Flies,
was performed in 1943. So too was Giraudoux’s
Sodom et Gomorrhe,
although it was produced without France’s greatest actor-manager, Louis Jouvet, who had taken his company into a nomadic exile in South America. One of the great successes had been Jean-Louis Barrault’s production of Paul Claudel’s
The Satin Shoe,
but Sartre and Beauvoir felt unable to judge the play objectively, so sickened were they by Claudel’s ‘
Ode au maréchal
’. Early in 1944, Jean Anouilh’s
Antigone
appeared, then shortly before the invasion of Normandy Sartre’s
Huis clos
was put on at the Vieux-Colombier. Thisplay about hell, which Brasillach went to see before going into hiding, was the most influential. The notion that ‘Hell is other people’ passed into international currency.
    More plays from the existentialist group followed over the next two years. In 1945 Albert Camus’s
Caligula
received